Dirk Eitzen. Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind. Volume 7, Issue 1, Summer 2013.
There is no question that violent entertainments shape popular attitudes toward violence. But do they really make the culture as a whole more violent? Can they work to make it less violent? This article considers shortcomings of conventional scholarly approaches to these questions. It outlines an alternative “ecological” approach and tests it by examining two movies that treat violence in strikingly different fashions: The Dark Knight (2008) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). It tests empirically whether and how Saving Private Ryan actually changes college students’ attitudes toward violence, and summarizes the best current psychological models of the causal connection between violent thoughts and violent behavior. The article concludes that while violent movies do indeed prompt violent ideas and impulses, these are not necessarily antisocial and can, in fact, be prosocial. The critical factor is not what they show or how they show it; it is how they are used.
Our movie theaters and TV screens are crowded with depictions of violence. These depictions move us, which means they produce changes in our mental and physical attitudes and dispositions. Some of these fade away the moment we turn from the screen, but many of them linger, beneath the threshold of awareness. The violence we see in movies shapes our attitude toward violence in the real world. For example, a movie like The Dark Knight Rises (2012) is likely to subtly influence when we regard actual violence as natural or necessary. If a lot of people watch many movies that promote similar attitudes toward violence, that is bound to have a significant impact on the whole culture.
Is this really true? This is an important question, which many have pondered, from social scientists, to film critics, to Supreme Court justices, to concerned parents. In the wake of the July 2012 movie theater massacre in Aurora, Colorado, the question has renewed urgency. The answers, unfortunately, are typically vague or ambivalent. Sometimes, they assume that violent movies have the same effect on everybody, which is manifestly not so. Sometimes, they refer to “risk factors” of violent entertainments in general, which does little to help us understand the impact of particular movies on particular people. The so-called experts on the topic come to vastly different conclusions. So the question is a vexed one, without clear answers. Perhaps instead of asking, “Is this really true?” we need to begin by asking, “Can we even find out if it is true?”
Dark Knight in Aurora
The shooting of scores of moviegoers at a midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado, sparked a new wave of soul searching among the public and in the press about the relationship between entertaining violence and actual violence. The Aurora incident is proof enough that there is a relationship. After all, as critic Dana Stevens (2012) observed, the shooter, James Holmes, “didn’t burst into a screening of Happy Feet Two.” Still, despite the fact that Holmes purportedly told police, “I am the Joker,” referring to the villain of the previous Dark Knight movie, virtually nobody supposes any kind of direct causal connection between his violent actions and the Batman movies. To the contrary, most commentators take pains to dismiss that possibility. Even conservative commentator Peggy Noonan, who assumes that movie violence has pernicious social effects, writes, “Did ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ cause the Aurora shootings? No, of course not. One movie does not have that kind of power.”
In an op-ed in the New York Times, Shakespeare scholar Stephen Marche (2012) asserts, “We have, mercifully, largely passed the point where we ask whether art causes such disasters. The parochial debates from the ’90s about whether rap and video games led to increases in the murder rate have been firmly, and happily, filed in the dustbin of intellectual history.” Marche’s own account of the Aurora shooting suggests a kind of reverse connection: Holmes was ready to go on a rampage, which had nothing at all to do with movies. He simply took advantage of the drama of The Dark Knight Rises to provide an occasion. A handful of prominent film critics, predictably eager to exculpate movies, adopt this same line of reasoning. Roger Ebert (2012) goes so far as to suggest that the violence of The Dark Knight Rises is not what attracted the shooter, just the fact that the movie happened to be the biggest public spectacle of the moment.
Nevertheless, critics and commentators assume that there is a subtle, indirect connection between movie violence and actual violence. “[J]ust because there is no responsibility,” Marche writes, “doesn’t mean there is no connection.” Stevens asks, “Why shouldn’t we assume … that the grim, violent fantasies we gather to consume as a culture have some power to bleed over from the screen into real life?” Noonan (2012) argues that, even though no single movie can spark a shooting, “a million violent movies have the cumulative power to desensitize and destabilize, to make things worse.” Time critic Richard Corliss (2012) assumes this same sort of cumulative power but puts a positive spin on it: “the point of view in even the goriest film is usually that of the victim, not the perpetrator. These movies say that violence is exciting but bad, evil and wrong; it has consequences. And there’s almost always a good buy to beat the bad guy in the end.”
I relate these quotes not to concur or contend with any of them. I simply wish to note certain common assumptions. Almost everyone agrees that movie violence does not cause actual violence. But there is also widespread agreement that movie violence can work to foster a cultural climate that somehow invites (or, for Corliss, discourages) actual violence. This effect is supposed to be subtle and cumulative. It is causation, of a sort, but indirect. Its power to influence behavior negatively is limited to the unstable and the immature—those whose minds are “less defended against dark cultural messages,” in Noonan’s words. But even for the rest of us, movie violence is supposed to leave some remainder in the background of our thoughts that can become manifest in dark fantasies, cynicism, and nonchalance toward violence. Such concerns are by no means new. Stephen Prince relates how, for decades, until its demise in 1968, the Production Code Administration regulated violence in Hollywood movies “because it took seriously the idea that film communicates ideas and values to viewers, and it feared that excessive ‘brutality’ and ‘gruesomeness’—to use its operative expressions—would degrade those values to an undesirably low level” (2003: 285).
Interestingly, critics do not seem terribly concerned about the experiential impact of cinematic violence: its power to excite, to fascinate, to frighten, to disgust, to prompt imaginative investment in stories and characters. In fact, they usually regard these in a positive light. What concerns them is that the violence may somehow wear off on viewers, contributing to a dark, jaded, uncivil, violent society. What concerns them is what might aptly be called cultural effects.
The “Cultural Effects” Conundrum
American screens serve up a steady stream of depictions of violence. If this tendency does, indeed, foster cynicism, nonchalance toward violence, or even just more interest in violent movies, it would make perfect sense to describe this connection as a cultural effect. Yet scholars of film and media rarely use such language. Indeed, the term cultural effects may strike them as something of an oxymoron. The reason is that there are two different disciplinary traditions, one dealing with “effects” and the other with “culture,” which tend to pull in opposite directions.
Scholars who look at the effects of movies are mainly psychologists and sociologists. These scholars study human actions and reactions; they measure correlations and causes. They are not so interested in people’s experience and intuitions, in part because those are notoriously unreliable guides to why people actually do what they do. In fact, the reasons I give for enjoying The Dark Knight Rises are nothing more than ex post facto rationalizations of my experience. The real reasons range from hormones to habits, which are inscrutable to me. I can only discover such reasons through science: by studying how people actually respond to different kinds of environmental cue (as opposed to how they think they respond or say they respond). What really matters is what people do. The realm of media effects research is, in short, the realm of human behavior.
Culture, in contrast, is all about meaning. Scholars who study culture are interested precisely in experience and intuitions. In trying to understand and explain human behavior (as opposed to the behavior of fruit flies and brain cells), perceived causes are the ones that count most. I enjoyed The Dark Knight Rises for the experience it gave me. That had to do with such factors as its exciting action, its virtuous hero, and my perception of its artistry. Even if my pleasure was caused by underlying factors that are invisible to me, like the release of dopamine in my brain, in terms of my experience those do not matter at all. Furthermore, a great deal of human behavior is mental—manifested in attitudes and ideas, not outward actions. There are no doubt connections between attitudes and actions, but those are contingent upon interests, social pressures, and many other situational variables. What really matters is what people think. The realm of cultural studies is, in short, the realm of interpretation.
There is a problem with looking at behavior alone, as effects researchers tend to do. Essentially, it sacrifices nuance. This is particularly so when one is looking at broad trends or statistical tendencies, such as the relationship between violent video games and aggression. It is manifestly the case that boys who play violent video games together, like Call of Duty, exhibit a lot of trash talking, which is a form of verbal aggression. One can therefore assert that playing Call of Duty tends to cause aggressive behavior. What is obviously missing from this summation is a crucial piece of interpretation: the boys are having fun. Their aggressive talk is intended as playful banter. When a boy was asked to explain the comment, “Fuck dat nigga!” his response was, in effect, “I didn’t mean anything by it.”
That example, from an ethnographic study of players’ behavior in an online gaming center (Payne 2009), illustrates a second level at which interpretation is also crucial. Regardless of how it is intended, “Fuck dat nigga!” is potentially offensive language and, in the instance reported in this study, it caused actual offense. Meaning is not just a matter of intentions; it is also a matter of social consequences. Those are not reducible to behavioral effects (e.g., aggressive talk); they extend to responses they engender in the minds of others (e.g., insult), plus attitudes and assumptions they spin off, of which participants in the discourse may not even be aware (about race and gender, for example). To tease out such consequences clearly requires interpretation.
But there is also a problem with interpretation alone. Essentially, interpretation relies on intuitive guesses that are likely to be incomplete, if not flat out wrong. For example, if I were to ask you, “Why did you fall in love with your sweetheart?” you would probably say something like, “His (or her) clever wit, his glowing smile, and because he loved me back.” The truth is, you do not really know. The real answer is way too complicated. It involves factors, like body chemistry, which you cannot even discern. So you invent a plausible answer—an answer that feels right. Because that’s the way the mind works, people accept such reasons as causes. But they are not causes. They are rationalizations: stories we tell ourselves.
Interpretation is the business of making up such stories. “The Joker in The Dark Knight is a psychopath,” is such a story. So is “the absence of women in the The Dark Knight, except as potential lovers and victims, is significant.” So is “Playing Call of Duty tends to cause aggressive behavior.” (It is important to recognize that scientists interpret, too, even though they are looking for causes rather than meanings.) The best such stories conform to reality in important respects. At the very least, they call attention to facts that invite or warrant explanation. That is what makes them useful. The problem arises when such stories are confounded with material causes and effects. Some culturally oriented scholars have tried to avoid making up stories by asking viewers to explain their own responses to cinematic violence (e.g., Barker 2011). This is a worthwhile endeavor, but it does not dodge the problem: an interpretation is still a story, whether it originates with a scholarly critic or an ordinary viewer. I regard both interpretation and effects research as legitimate paths to real knowledge. Again, my purpose is not to take sides or even criticize. I simply wish to point out that the scholarly literature on media violence reflects two distinct traditions, which seek different kinds of answer, assume the fundamental importance of different kinds of knowledge, and therefore tend to pull practitioners in opposite directions.
An Eco/logical Synthesis
There are good reasons to suppose that a rapprochement between the two research traditions I describe is possible. Indeed, there are indications that it is already well underway. There is common ground in that scholars in both traditions are looking for actual patterns. I say actual patterns because, while it is easy to project imaginary patterns onto things, for a pattern to be useful from an explanatory standpoint, it needs to be based on empirical observations that can be examined or tested.
The problem arises because patterns in the two domains—effects and meanings—can seem incommensurable. They are in fact materially connected, as both social scientists and humanities scholars increasingly acknowledge. Some media effects researchers, studying media violence, have been taking the trouble to ask subjects about the reasons for their behavior and making a point to factor those into their causal explanations (e.g., Kutner and Olson 2008). Some have done experiments to discover how viewers actually parse cinematic violence (Tamborini et al., in this issue). On the other side of the disciplinary divide, humanities scholars interested in ideology have long been concerned with the material impact of ideas. Although this interest has played out largely in speculative theories, there are culturally oriented scholars of movie violence who have drawn deliberately on the scientific literature (e.g., Prince 1998, 2000). Others have conducted their own empirical studies of audience responses (Barker 2011; Hill 2005).
To discover the material connections between particular interpretations and general effects requires what might be called an ecological perspective. Ecology is an example of systems thinking, applied to biological phenomena. To understand the behavior of honeybees, from an ecological perspective, requires knowing about the organization of beehives. In turn, to understand the organization of beehives requires knowing about the behavior of honeybees. It does not make sense to try to understand bees apart from beehives and beehives apart from their larger environment. This same logic applies to understanding the impact of cinematic violence. Movies do things to people. The Dark Knight Rises puts images of violence into viewers’ minds. Images of violence spill over into the real world, in children’s play, for instance. At the same time, people do things with movies. Viewers are actors in the equation. We do not just soak up ideas of violence from movies. We respond to them, reflect on them, and use them in ways that serve our own interests and needs.
The only real stretch to this way of thinking for film scholars is that it requires a materialist conception of culture. The discipline of film studies is steeped in a tradition of philosophical idealism, which asserts that meaning arises from arbitrary systems of signs and that social reality is an artificial construct. These assertions are true, to a point, but sign systems and social constructs are always built upon and embedded in the physical world. An ecological perspective holds that the material world is fundamental in understanding all human activities, including thought and culture. Even though it is true that movies generate immaterial ideas and meanings, the only extent to which those really matter is the extent to which they have some material manifestation, in brains, in behavior, or in culture.
The method of ecological science is to look for material connections in a system. This method boils down to trying to discover actual patterns in a system then trying to determine the physical mechanisms that account for these patterns. There is no reason why we cannot apply the same method to come to a more ecological understanding of the impact of cinematic violence.
First, we can look for actual patterns of violence in movies. Film scholars in the humanities have done a great deal of work in this area. While we need to be cautious about making causal inferences from such patterns, on the one hand, and about projecting interpretations on them, on the other, we can safely assume that any actual patterns we discover have material causes and consequences.
Second, we can look for actual patterns in people’s responses: in the things they say and do after being exposed to specific examples of movie violence (see, e.g., Barker 2011; Hill 2005). We need to be cautious about accepting people’s interpretations as explanations. If somebody says something like, “I knew that The Dark Knight was fantasy, so its violence didn’t affect me at all,” we cannot take that at face value. But by digging deeper, perhaps by asking questions like, “What makes the Dark Knight a hero?” we may be able to discover patterns of thought that indicate how violence in movies leaves marks on viewers’ ideas and attitudes in ways that they may not even be aware of. Moreover, we can find out what they go into violent movies looking for and expecting, which shapes what they see and take away.
Third, we can look to the sciences—psychology, sociology, and brain science, in particular—to try to understand the mechanisms by which patterns in the environment (including patterns of violence in movies) come to be expressed in patterns of human thought and behavior (including culture). This enterprise can be complicated and indirect, but it provides an empirically based means of moving from simply observing patterns in movies and audience responses to accounting for their causes and consequences.
Patterns of Violence in The Dark Knight and Saving Private Ryan
There are twenty major scenes of violence in The Dark Knight, by my count. These range from cold-blooded executions, to extended battles with fists, guns, and hi-tech gadgets, to spectacular explosions. There are some obvious patterns to this violence. Batman (Christian Bale) does not shoot people, for instance. He beats the bejesus out of bad guys and casually wreaks all manner of property damage, but he stops short of taking human lives. On two occasions, he could easily kill the Joker (Heath Ledger)—once by running him down with his motorcycle, once by throwing him off a high rise—but he deliberately refrains.
There is also an ostensible moral to the movie, concerning violence. The Joker believes that people are fundamentally selfish. “When the chips are down,” he tells Batman, “these ‘civilized’ people, they’ll eat each other.” He sets out to prove this by rigging two ferryboats to explode. One is full of convicts, being transported from one prison to another; the other is full of commuters. He announces to the crew and passengers of both that they can save themselves by blowing up the other. On the prison ferry, just before the deadline, a big, mean-looking convict relieves a guard of the detonator and throws it overboard. On the commuters’ ferry, a Wall Street type, who has been agitating to blow up the prison boat, decides when handed the detonator that he cannot press the trigger after all. The implicit lesson here is that most people will risk sacrificing their own lives rather than killing a boatload of strangers. When the chips are down, altruism trumps violence.
But there is another subtler thread that runs through the violence in the movie, nicely illustrated by the famous pencil “magic trick” scene. This scene is our real introduction to the character of the Joker. The heads of Gotham’s gangs have met for a summit, because the Joker has stolen some of their money. The Joker strolls into the room, unannounced, and walks to the head of the table. One of the gangsters growls, “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t have my boy here pull your head off.” “How about a magic trick,” the Joker replies. He jams a pencil into the table with a flourish, saying, “I’m going to make this pencil disappear.” Then he grabs the gangster’s “boy” by the back of the head and slams the head down on the upright pencil. When the man slides to the floor behind the table, the pencil is gone.
This “trick” is sudden and shocking, but there is no blood, no gore, no sight of the dead guy, and no further mention of him. To both the characters in the movie and the audience, the dead guy in effect vanishes along with the pencil. Both the meeting and the movie simply carry on. There is no consequence to the brutal act. There is of course a point: the point is to impress. Violence gets people’s attention. That is why the Joker does it. Beyond that, pain and suffering are beside the point. The Dark Knight systematically erases anything that might arouse spectators’ sympathy with the victims of violence or concern for their suffering.
In discussions of cinematic violence, one often encounters the term gratuitous violence. That usually seems to mean a depiction of violence that revolves around spectacle and suspense and downplays suffering and sentiment. The opposite is, presumably, a representation of violence that foregrounds suffering and serves up large doses of sentiment. I can think of no better example than Saving Private Ryan (1998).
Whereas Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan is a master of the cerebral spectacle, Saving Private Ryan director Steven Spielberg is a master of the melodramatic moment. A striking example is the scene in which an army officer and a priest drive to the rural Ryan farmstead to inform the mother that three of her four sons are dead. The mother is washing dishes. Through the kitchen window, she sees the army car coming down the long dirt lane. She dries her hands and steps out on the porch. We see her from inside the house, framed in the doorway, in silhouette. Inside the door, in a pool of light, we see a small desk with framed photographs of the boys. As the priest steps from the car, the mother staggers then collapses to a seated position on the porch. The officer and priest approach and kneel down beside her. We hear no dialog, just solemn music. The mother remains in silhouette; we do not see her face. To make sense of this slow scene, we are required to fill in the blanks—to imagine the mother’s thoughts and feelings. We are required to empathize.
The only scene in The Dark Knight that remotely resembles this one is when the noble district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), driven mad by rage and grief by the Joker’s murder of his sweetheart, threatens to kill the police chief’s young son in misguided retribution. The mother weeps, the father begs, and the little boy is terrified. This is the stuff of melodrama. It portends sacrifice and suffering. But that is not the way the scene unfolds. Instead, we get a windy dialog between Dent and Batman about morality and chance, the music is suspenseful rather than solemn, and Batman saves the boy. The violence revolves around action and suspense, not sentiment and suffering.
Two other scenes in Saving Private Ryan nicely illustrate the way that movie systematically frames violence in emotional terms. One is the long battlefield scene in the first part the movie. The action—the capture of a beachhead at Normandy—is punctuated by graphic images of carnage and shots of soldiers’ emotional reactions. These devices drive home, viscerally, the emotional consequences of war: the pain and panic, the suffering and death.
The other scene unfolds in more typical narrative fashion. It features a nerdy interpreter, Corporal Upham (Jeremy Davies), who recoils from violence and is clearly ill prepared for active duty. Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) has dragooned him into his small unit, to go cross-country, searching for Private Ryan. The American soldiers capture and intend to execute a German machine gunner who has shot and killed one of their own. Upham befriends the German and pleads for his life. Captain Miller decides to release the prisoner. Toward the end of the movie, in the heat of battle, Upham comes face to face with the same German soldier, once again gunning down Americans. Despite not having fired a single shot in several extreme firefights prior to this scene, Upham deliberately shoots the German.
This scene presents what could be called a moral lesson in melodramatic and emotional terms. When the interpreter finally kills somebody, it is not some faceless enemy; it is somebody whom he knows, who has in fact called to him by name. There is no explanation; he just does it. If there is indeed a lesson here, it is visceral rather than cerebral: killing is traumatic; killing is complicated; killing (and not killing) has consequences. Instead of being asked to judge Upham’s actions, we are invited to empathize with him. The ending of the scene drives this home: the camera lingers on his face, dirge-like music swells, and instead of capturing or shooting the knot of German soldiers he holds at gunpoint, Upham tells them to run away. The earlier scene with the mother invites us to imagine the anguish of the death of a loved one. The battlefield sequence invites us to imagine the anguish of facing death. This scene invites us to imagine the anguish of killing.
Admittedly, the sweep of the story as a whole pulls us in another direction. As the title indicates, the story is about noble self-sacrifice for the good of comrades and nation—about altruism, in a word. In contrast to the altruism in The Dark Knight, which is a matter of choices and actions, the altruism in Saving Private Ryan is about willingly suffering and dying. But it is no less “heroic” for that.
“Sentimental Education” and Saving Private Ryan
Social psychologists Baumeister and Beck (1999) found that victims of violence tend to see the violence in moral terms, focusing on suffering and harm, while perpetrators take a more detached amoral stance, focusing on causes and context. In its erasure of suffering of and sympathy for victims, The Dark Knight definitely takes the perpetrator’s perspective. Saving Private Ryan, in contrast, takes the victim’s perspective. Both stances are natural and normal self-protective responses. Both can be helpful or harmful, prosocial or antisocial, depending on the circumstances. But if we eschew violence, the victim’s stance definitely feels more righteous. That, by and large, is how audiences and critics responded to the depiction of violence in Saving Private Ryan—as righteous.
This kind of response can be characterized as ideological, in the sense of a value judgment that feels (or is passed off as) natural, normal, right, and good. In his recent massive treatise on the history of violence, Stephen Pinker maintains that ideology, in this sense, accounts for more human violence than any other factor in history:
Individual people have no shortage of selfish motives for violence. But the really big body counts in history pile up when a large number of people carry out a motive that transcends any one of them: an ideology. Like predatory or instrumental violence, ideological violence is a means to an end. But with an ideology, the end is idealistic: a conception of the greater good. (2011: 556)
But Pinker also argues that ideology, in the form of what Norbert Elias ([1939] 2000) called the civilizing process, contributed to the Humanitarian Revolution that began in the seventeenth century and to the dramatic decline in human violence that has continued ever since, despite occasional setbacks.
In a discussion of the persuasive power of emotional responses to movies, Carl Plantinga mentions three possibilities. “One might argue that the division between fiction and fact is so strong and clear that emotional responses within the confines of the movie viewing have no effect on responses or beliefs on other contexts” (2009: 201). Tom and Jerry cartoons and the Lord of the Rings movies are clearly fantasies. I can relish the violence in such movies precisely because it is so remote from my actual experience. The fantasy creates a kind of firewall. Perhaps The Dark Knight is that kind of movie. Maybe even Saving Private Ryan works that way. Perhaps it allows me to “pretend” while watching it that killing and dying for one’s country are noble and worthwhile, without swaying in the least my actual beliefs to the contrary.
A second possibility is that movies might “enlarge understanding and sympathy for characters whose lives and experiences extend far beyond our own experience, and thus enhance our sentimental education” (Plantinga 2009: 202). Pinker supposes that the rise of literacy and literature contributed to the decline of violence, for just this reason.
Stepping into someone else’s vantage point reminds you that the other fellow has a first-person, present-tense, ongoing stream of consciousness that is very much like your own but not the same as your own. It’s not a big leap to suppose that the habit of reading other people’s words could put one in the habit of entering other people’s minds, including their pleasures and pains. Slipping even for a moment into the perspective of someone who is turning black in a pillory or desperately pushing burning faggots away from her body or convulsing under the two hundredth stroke of the lash may give a person second thoughts as to whether these cruelties should ever be visited upon anyone. (2011: 175)
The Dark Knight is not much interested in sentiment, period, much less sentimental education. It is “just entertainment.” Its artistry, like its violence, is designed mainly to impress. In contrast, the artistry of Saving Private Ryan, with its newsreel effects, its melodramatic moments, and its graphic depictions of carnage, is designed to persistently prompt us to connect what we are seeing on the screen with “real life.” Sentimental education is its ostensible goal.
That is what makes its treatment of violence particularly interesting: it is supposed to teach us something positive and useful.
Yet there remains a third possibility. Movies “can narrow our horizons, confuse us morally, encourage the superficial stereotyping of persons, enhance our taste for trivia, spectacle, and simplistic solutions to difficult problems, and generally and unthinkingly support the status quo” (Plantinga 2009: 203). Where violence is concerned, they can “have the cumulative power to desensitize and destabilize, to make things worse,” to quote Noonan. One can easily imagine how such might be the case with the consequence-free violence in The Dark Knight or, even more, with the gleeful carnage in Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino movies. But negative effects could be even more profound with a sentimental movie (i.e., an overtly ideological movie) such as Saving Private Ryan. As historian Howard Zinn observed, Saving Private Ryan “draws on our deep feeling for the GIs to rescue, not just Private Ryan, but the good name of war” (1998: 139). Sentimental education can work for good or for ill. And, by the way, it works in ways that filmmakers cannot fully anticipate and control.
Saving Private Ryan’s Influence on Attitudes toward Violence: An Experiment
I make no claim that what follows is solid social scientific research. It is an experiment in the looser sense: an attempt to answer a “What happens when…?” question by trying something out. Even so, I attempted to be careful and rigorous enough in my method so that any strong pattern that might emerge from the data can be regarded as an actual one. The particular question that drove the experiment was, “Does watching Saving Private Ryan affect students’ ideas and attitudes concerning violence, generally?” More broadly, the question is, “Is there any evidence that ‘sentimental education’ actually happens?”
I could not expect students’ answers to change if I asked them the same question before and after watching the movie, so I came up with four different questions to ask: “Do you think the US invasion of Iraq was justified?” “Can you think of any situation in which it might be appropriate or necessary to punch another student?” “Do you think our campus police should carry guns?” and “Would you ever consider serving in the military?” I gave the first pair of questions to 12 of 24 students in an introductory film class, and the second pair of questions to the other 12. I had the students write a 5-minute essay response to each of their two questions. The next evening, students watched Saving Private Ryan. After the screening, I gave them the other pair of questions to answer.
I scored students’ answers to each pair of questions on a 10-point scale, with 1 being “totally against violence” and 10 being “totally supportive of ‘just’ violence.” I shuffled the essays and took other measures to avoid bias in my scoring. Incidentally, the scoring task felt just about as objective to me (and as subjective) as assigning letter grades to exam essays. The results appear in the table, below.
| Questions about Iraq and punching a student | Questions about campus cops and joining military | |
| All answers | 5.13 | 5.92 |
| Before Private Ryan | 5.25 | 5.58 |
| After Private Ryan | 5.00 | 6.25 |
| Change | -0.25 | +0.67 |
These numbers might indicate that watching Saving Private Ryan makes students feel ever so slightly less likely to consider punching another student and ever so slightly more likely to consider joining the army. Or, given that the change is small and goes both up and down, it might show that Saving Private Ryan does little to budge students’ preexisting attitudes toward violence. Or the change in the bottom line could just be “noise” (that is, slop in the experiment). The first of these answers is the one I would like to believe, as it accords with my intuitions: the sentiments in Saving Private Ryan seem to support the somewhat contradictory attitudes that (a) violence is always horrible and best to avoid but (b) it can be necessary and even noble when committed or suffered in pursuit of patriotic goals. Honestly, though, given the difficulty I had in assigning numbers to some of the students’ essays, I admit that the quantitative change in students’ scores is far more likely to be noise.
But there is qualitative evidence to examine here, too. Most students’ scores changed by only a point, but there are a handful of students whose responses took a big swing of three or four points, up or down, after watching the movie. Even though the students’ essays are not long enough to allow me to confidently explain those swings, I see some evidence that the students whose scores went down felt more empathic after watching Saving Private Ryan. For example, a student whose attitude before the movie can be summarized by the quote, “It is necessary to punch back to protect yourself,” afterward wrote, “Sometimes words are more powerful than guns or anything else.” Another one, who before the movie, gave utterly selfish reasons for not considering military service, later wrote, “If we had tried to understand [the Iraqi’s] differences from us and work with them rather than be dominant, we could have had a more positive outcome.” I also see some signs that students whose scores went up dramatically (toward justification of violence) were swept along by the just-and-necessary-violence theme of Saving Private Ryan. One of these began her first essay, before the screening, “Personally, I am more of a pacifist and anti-war in nature,” but her fourth, after the screening, “I completely understand and respect people who choose to go into the military.”
In a debriefing after the experiment, many students told me that, even though they found Saving Private Ryan to be an exceptionally affecting movie, they still regarded it as “just a movie.” Even though it allowed them to feel what it was “really like” to be in a battle or to lose a loved one in war, it did nothing to change their attitudes and ideas about violence in general.
Mechanisms of Cultural Influence
To a materialist, culture is not an abstract system of meanings floating around in some intersubjective ether. It is the cumulative manifestation of the attitudes and ideas of groups of individuals in concrete behaviors. The science that studies the connections between attitudes, ideas, and behaviors is cognitive psychology. That seems the logical place to begin. Sociologists who study media violence agree, as do scientists who study actual violence. Their explanatory models are, by and large, cognitive psychological models.
The reigning model of effects of media violence is the general aggression model, developed by sociologist Craig Anderson and associates (2001, 2004, 2007). Although the model is fairly complex, it revolves around just two mechanisms: priming and learning.
Priming is best explained with an example. In a well-known experiment, college students were given scrambled words, like “they her thirsty see usually,” and asked to construct grammatical sentences with them, as quickly as possible (Bargh et al. 1996). For half the subjects, the scrambled words included words associated with the elderly, such as wise, wrinkled, alone, conservative, and knits. Later, the students were surreptitiously timed as they walked down the hall to an elevator. Students who had been exposed to the words associated with the elderly took significantly longer to make the trip. When debriefed, the students said they had no idea that they had been systemically exposed to words related to aging and stoutly denied that this could have affected their walking speed. This is an example of priming. The same effect has been demonstrated in countless other contexts.
Because our situation is constantly changing and, along with it, the stimuli we receive from the environment, priming is a relatively short-lived effect. There is one notable exception: if a priming event is repeated, the body and brain come to anticipate it and to respond accordingly. Our response becomes ingrained. This is an example of learning. Anything that is repeated, from an activity to an association, tends to be learned. The more emotionally charged an experience, the less repetition is required. A single highly charged event, like being bitten by a dog, can produce powerful learned responses, like nervousness around all dogs. As an association or an activity becomes learned, like fear of dogs or how to drive a car, it becomes more habitual and automatic. In some contexts, we might call this sensitization: after being bitten by a dog, one is sensitized to the danger of dogs. In other contexts, we might call it desensitization: after lots of driving a manual transmission car, one tends to become oblivious to the mechanics of clutching and shifting.
How might priming and learning apply to the impact of violence in Saving Private Ryan? If we are pacifists, the sensitivities and sentiments we take into the movie might prime us to pay particular attention to the suffering. If we are soldiers, we might be primed to pay more attention to the guns and glory. If we are deeply moved by the anguish in the movie, we will likely be primed to think about suffering caused by violence in Afghanistan when we read about it in the newspaper. If we are moved by the courage and self-sacrifice of the movie’s protagonists, we will probably be primed to see American involvement in Afghanistan in a positive light. By empathizing with Captain Miller and Colonel Upham, we could be practicing and thereby learning how to connect emotionally with the suffering of other people, which tends to diminish violence. Or we could be practicing and learning the us/them frame of mind that often condones violence. In either case, what we learn is bound to be associated with watching a movie in safety and comfort. If we were confronted with actual violence, more deeply ingrained inclinations would take over.
There are an awful lot of “ifs” and “ors” in the previous paragraph. This illustrates that it is not the stimulus alone (i.e., the movie) that produces primed and learned responses, but the stimulus in context. If we wish to understand the actual impact of any instance of movie violence, we need to take into account why people are watching it, what they experience while they are watching, and how they process that experience.
There is also another psychological mechanism to consider: inhibition. If you look at scientific research into actual violence, in fields ranging from sociology to neuroscience, you discover that the critical factor is not aggressive thoughts and impulses. Those are everyday occurrences that relatively rarely spill over into actual violence. The critical factor in actual violence is the failure or circumvention or underdevelopment of internal mechanisms of self-control.
Empathy with others is normally a powerful emotional constraint against violence and harmful behavior. You are less likely to hurt people if you can feel their pain. It seems very likely that watching Saving Private Ryan results in the priming and learning of empathetic responses. But even if empathy with others is, on the whole, a “civilizing” influence, as Stephen Pinker supposes, he notes that it can also be used to justify violence. “Empathy is not a reflex that makes us sympathetic to everyone we lay eyes upon. It can be switched on and off, or thrown into reverse, by our construal of the relationship we have with a person” (2011: 591), like the Germans in Saving Private Ryan and the Joker in The Dark Knight. The solution to the problem of violence, Pinker concludes, is the subordination of emotions to principles, like fair play and human rights, combined with deliberate decision making and self-restraint. It is, in short, the cultivation of reason and self-control.
Does Movie Violence Undermine Reason and Self-Control?
This, then, may be the crux of the matter. If what concerns us is the impact of cinematic violence on the culture, the crucial factor is not whether the violence shows a victim’s perspective or a perpetrator’s. It is not whether it encourages or discourages sentimental responses. It is not whether we find it exciting or repellant. It is not whether we approve or disapprove of its explicit morals or implicit ideology. The crucial factor is whether it cultivates reason and self-control. Does Saving Private Ryan cultivate reason and self-control? Does The Dark Knight undermine it? How can we tell?
Proponents of the general aggression model typically suppose that all depictions of violence, no matter how farfetched or moral, have the effect of priming and teaching antisocial attitudes and behaviors, thereby undermining reason and self-control. Their research tends to support this view. For this reason, they are strong advocates of limiting or avoiding violence in entertainment: exercising reason and control at the front end to sidestep the possibility of irresistible harm at the back end. But if lack of self-control is a root cause of violence, as much research indicates, the cure is certainly not to tiptoe around violent thoughts and impulses; it is, instead, to help people learn how to deal with them in healthy and prosocial ways. That requires actively engaging with them. Fiction and films might be excellent ways of doing that.
This is an argument made quite compellingly by Gerard Jones, comic book author turned educator and critic (2002). Jones argues that viewers of violent movies, by imagining what they fear in a safe context, in effect practice their fear and so develop a sense of control over both their emotional responses and the ideas that cause them. Stories and movies about violence, by freeing people from their fears, help them respond more rationally and pragmatically to real-world violence. This includes being better able to feel empathy and understanding for its victims. But even if this is true, it neglects negative or antisocial attitudes and behaviors that violent entertainments may teach. Seeing Batman beat up the Joker does not just show me that I can control my emotions; it shows me that torturing bad guys is perfectly okay.
In a short but important essay, film critic Devin McKinney (1993) argues that any movie violence that makes us feel uneasy or sets us back on our heels will give us pause and prompt us to think about it. Alternatively, any movie violence that is conventional, casual, and consequence-free will tend to slide under the radar of conscious thought. The first kind has the likely effect of cultivating reason and self-control; the second, of undermining it. By this reasoning, Saving Private Ryan promotes reason and self-control not because it encourages empathy, but because its violence challenges us and makes us uncomfortable. The Dark Knight, in contrast, presents torture and instrumental violence so entertainingly and bloodlessly that we thoughtlessly soak it up. This argument is certainly plausible. It accords with a vast body of psychological research on automatic versus conscious processing in the brain, elegantly reviewed by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman (2011). But it also suggests that an appalling scene of torture-porn, such as the scene in the popular horror movie Hostel: Part II (2007) in which one naked woman sadistically flays another, can have the effect of promoting reason and self-control. I find this doubtful. It seems far more likely to trigger and reinforce harmful cultural scripts for sexual violence.
Ironically, the scene in which Batman tortures the Joker deals expressly with reason and self-control. It explicitly poses the question of whether Batman has lost control of his emotions. At the same time, the Joker perversely uses cool reason to justify his own violence. We have no time to think about this irony, or even to notice it. The question is, does this scene make it easier for the viewer to tolerate or condone or even take part in something like the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib?
The bottom line is this: reason and self-control are not learned from movies. They are acquired, in part, just by growing up. To the extent they are cultivated or learned, that takes place through active engagement with the social environment, where direct feedback takes place, chiefly in face-to-face interactions with other people. Violent movies can support this kind of learning by allowing people to imagine violent or challenging face-to-face interactions and by permitting them to think through them and talk about them. Sad and disturbing movies, like Saving Private Ryan, are more likely to support this kind of discourse than fun escapist ones, like The Dark Knight. But we do not learn how to behave from movies. We learn how to behave from parents, friends, and other people with whom we come in contact. For this reason, we need not worry about whether violence in movies edifies or degrades the culture. We are free to judge it on other grounds, like whether it is enjoyable, whether it is well-crafted, whether it depicts good behavior, and whether it supports good political views.
Afterward
Shortly after the release of Saving Private Ryan, Howard Zinn wrote, “Our culture is in deep trouble when a film like Saving Private Ryan can pass by, like a military parade, with nothing but a shower of confetti and hurrahs for its color and grandeur. Yet, surely, it is nothing new that people with moral sensibility must create their own culture” (1998: 140).
Zinn is factually wrong, because his was just one of many critical voices mixed in with the confetti and hurrahs. But he is more deeply wrong because despite the virtual explosion of violence in popular entertainments, actual violence in our culture continues to decline and attention to reason and self-control continues to rise, as Stephen Pinker shows.
But Zinn is right in stressing the power we have to shape our own culture. We are not passive victims or vessels of depictions of violence; we use them. They do not make us act in any particular way; we choose how we will act. Furthermore, movies, novels, and video games are forms of make believe. The reason we are free to enjoy violence in stories is precisely because we know that the violence is not real. This does not guarantee that it is good or even harmless, but it is in any case not actual violence. If we aspire to be non-violent and if we teach our children to be nonviolent, no amount of violent entertainment is going to turn them or us into bullies or warmongers.
Furthermore, stories have the power to cultivate empathy. They allow us to see beyond the horizons of our own emotional experience. It does us no harm to imagine what it feels like to be in a fight. It does us some good to imagine being a hero. Imagining the experiences of others, even violent experiences and imaginary others, gives us tools to help us to connect better with real people. Moreover, movies provide social experiences. In this way, too, violent movies can help to connect people.
Violent movies, including Saving Private Ryan and The Dark Knight, are part of a mainstream culture of violence and without question tend to sustain it. Nevertheless, engaging with such entertainments, even enjoying them, does not necessarily mean embracing or supporting the culture of violence. Violent entertainments can be healthy or harmful, prosocial or antisocial. They can make us more prone to violence, or less. The difference lies not in what they depict or how they depict it. The difference lies in what we do with them. And that is not up to the entertainments; it is up to us.